William Frankland, who has died aged 108, worked with Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, persuaded Saddam Hussein to give up his 40-a-day habit and, as one of the most eminent and senior practitioners in the management and treatment of allergy, championed the view that an allergic reaction is due to a malfunctioning immune system; he also developed the idea of a pollen count to help hay fever sufferers.

In 2012, at the age of 100, Frankland who was known to all as Bill became probably the worlds oldest expert witness when he was called by the defence to prepare a report on a motorist charged with dangerous driving, who claimed that a delayed reaction to a wasp sting had caused him to pass out, with the result that he had become involved in a head-on collision.

The prosecution alleged that the defendant had been distracted while changing tracks on his iPod or using his mobile phone. In his evidence Frankland confirmed that the defendant suffered from an allergy to wasp stings.

But he agreed with a prosecution witness that cases of delayed reaction occur only where a patient has shown symptoms immediately after a sting which the defendant had not. The man was duly convicted.

Franklands career in immunology began in the 1950s when he joined the Department of Allergic Disorders in the Wright-Fleming Institute at St Marys, Paddington, dealing with patients who suffered from seasonal hay fever.

He and his colleagues undertook a series of trials which showed that antihistamine tablets, the standard treatment at the time, were ineffective against pollen asthma. After publishing the results in a paper in the Lancet entitled Prophylaxis of Summer Hay-fever and Asthma, to facilitate further research Frankland took over the running of St Marys pollinarium, turning it into the worlds largest pollen production plant.

Frankland argued that the rise in levels of allergy can be linked to increased levels of hygiene in modern life, noting, for example, that people living in the former East Germany experienced much lower levels of allergies than their counterparts in the more prosperous West Germany.

He became a leading proponent of allergen immunotherapy, in which the patient is vaccinated with increasingly larger doses of an allergen with the aim of inducing immunological tolerance, and was the first clinician to demonstrate the benefits of grass pollen immunotherapy.

Over the years, tens of thousands of his patients injected themselves with pollen on a daily basis.

Frankland was keen to provide hay fever sufferers with information about the level of pollen in the air, and on his recommendation St Marys recruited a full-time botanist to produce pollen counts. Weekly London counts were sent to members of the British Allergy Society from 1953 and to the media every day from 1963.

Frankland went on to study insect venom allergies, using himself as a subject. Through the London School of Tropical Medicine, he obtained the South American species Rhodnius prolixus, which he could be sure he had never been bitten by before, to measure his own allergic reaction.

After the insect had bitten him at weekly intervals for eight weeks, he suffered a severe anaphylactic shock and nearly died: All I could do was hold up three fingers to indicate the doses of adrenalin the nurse should inject me with, he recalled.

The son of a parson, Alfred William Frankland was born in Sussex on March 19 1912. His mother had had no idea she was expecting twins until his arrival closely followed that of his brother Jack. My cot was a chest of drawers, he recalled.

He grew up in the Lake District and attended St Bees School, before studying medicine at Oxford and St Marys, where as a student he ran for London University against Oxford and Cambridge and captained the hockey team. He began his first job at St Marys as a house physician to Winston Churchills doctor Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran) in 1938.

At the outbreak of war, Frankland joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was promoted captain. Posted to Singapore, on arrival he tossed a coin with a colleague to decide upon the institution where each would work.

Some two months later, on February 15 1942, the Japanese swept into Singapore. His colleague, who had gone to the Alexandra Hospital, died there along with other staff, killed by Japanese soldiers armed with bayonets. Frankland survived the invasion but endured three and a half years of hell in an internment camp on Blakang Mati Island.

Despite the gruelling tropical heat, the shortage of food and diseases such as beriberi, dengue fever and dysentery, Frankland retained enough intellectual curiosity to notice and wonder why the Japanese guards seemed remarkably unaffected by bites from native insects to which many of his fellow PoWs were allergic.

After liberation, so emaciated that even sitting down was painful just bones on a hard seat Frankland was flown in a convoy of three Dakotas to Rangoon for rehabilitation and a ship home. The aircraft hit a storm over the mountains of southern Burma, and one did not make it.

After V-J Day he returned to St Marys to specialise in dermatology, but decided to apply for a part-time job at the hospital working in allergies which ended up being his vocation.

During the early 1950s he served as clinical assistant to Alexander Fleming and later wrote a chapter on penicillin for a book edited by Fleming, in which he predicted (correctly) that Flemings wonder drug would cause allergic reactions in some patients.

Fleming, who did not really believe in allergies, made him change the passage: He was wrong, Frankland observed, but you cant really argue with a Nobel Prize winner.

Frankland became director of the Allergy Department (now the Frankland Clinic) at St Marys in 1962 and subsequently undertook research into latex allergy among other conditions. After retiring in 1977 he worked as an allergist at Guys Hospital for 20 years, but in 1997, aged 85, returned to St Marys as an emeritus consultant.

Frankland treated royalty, stars and even dictators. In 1979 he was flown to Iraq to treat Saddam Hussein, who was being treated with desensitising injections for some unspecified allergy.

He wasnt allergic at all, Frankland recalled. His problem was that he was smoking 40 cigarettes a day. I told him to stop and if he wouldnt I would refuse to come and see him again. I dont think anyone had spoken to him like that before.

I heard some time later that he had had a disagreement with his secretary of state for health, so he took him outside and shot him. Maybe I was lucky.

Frankland made a significant contribution to organisations concerned with allergies. He was honorary secretary of the Asthma Research Council for 35 years and served as president of the Anaphylaxis Campaign and of the British Allergy Society (now the British Allergy and Clinical Immunology Society), which established the William Frankland Award for Outstanding Services in the field of Clinical Allergy in 1999.

He was president of the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the International Association of Aerobiology, and was a founder member of Asthma UK. In 2006 Frankland was awarded the Clemens von Pirquet Medal for Clinical Research.

On his 100th birthday in 2012, Frankland was as busy as ever. He had just had a paper accepted by The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and said he had no intention of stopping work. He told The Daily Telegraph: If I wasnt interested in things how would I do in my old age? I hope I am just going to keep going. In 2015 he was made an MBE.

William Frankland married Pauline; she died in 2002, and he is survived by their three daughters and a son.

William Frankland, born March 19 1912, died April 2 2020

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